The Scenario
Three thousand mobile numbers. Loyalty program sign-ups from the past eighteen months. Your retail brand just negotiated a price break on a bulk SMS send — but the vendor charges per message delivered, and the deliverability rate on your last send was 71%. You can't afford another campaign where nearly a third of the messages vanish into disconnected numbers.
Your marketing manager needs to know, before the purchase order goes out, which of these numbers are currently active on a network.
The bad version:
- Research HLR lookup providers, sign up for one with a bulk upload option, export the sheet to CSV, upload it
- Wait for the results file — which arrives 40 minutes later in a format with different column headers than you expected
- Map the results back to the original sheet rows by phone number string, discover the results file stripped the leading plus sign from international numbers, and the match fails on 400 rows
The price break window closes tomorrow. This is not where your afternoon was supposed to go.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Google Sheet. Through its built-in Neutrino integration, it runs HLR lookups on every number in column A and writes the active status and current carrier directly into the columns you specify — in the same sheet, same rows, no re-importing required.
For each mobile number in column A, run a Neutrino HLR lookup and write whether the number is active in column B and the current carrier name in column C. Mark any number that is currently inactive with INACTIVE and any number that has been ported to a different carrier with PORTED.
What You Get
- Column B: ACTIVE, INACTIVE, or PORTED — for every row, no blanks
- Column C: the current carrier name as returned by the HLR lookup
- Results land inline in the sheet — you can filter column B to ACTIVE immediately and hand the filtered list to the SMS vendor
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Numbers are formatted inconsistently across rows
Normalize all phone numbers in column A to E.164 format, then run Neutrino HLR lookups on each and write active status in column B and current carrier in column C.
You want to see inactive numbers flagged with color as well as text
Run Neutrino HLR lookups on all numbers in column A. Write ACTIVE, INACTIVE, or PORTED in column B. Highlight any INACTIVE rows in column A red and any PORTED rows orange.
You need to cross-reference against the original carrier recorded at sign-up in column B
Run Neutrino HLR lookups on all numbers in column A. Write the current carrier in column C. Compare the current carrier in column C against the sign-up carrier in column B. Flag any row where the carrier has changed with PORTED in column D.
Full list qualification in one shot
Normalize all numbers in column A, run Neutrino HLR lookups, write the active status in column B and current carrier in column C, remove all INACTIVE rows, flag PORTED rows in orange, and produce a summary showing the total count of active, inactive, and ported numbers before filtering.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your loyalty contact sheet, then ask SheetXAI to run Neutrino HLR lookups on column A before committing to the SMS send budget. See also the phone validation spoke if you want carrier and number type alongside the active-status check.